Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The world is obliged to nod approvingly at, if not kneel to, Shakespeare’s folios, those collections of 36 plays first printed in 1623, then again in 1632, 1663–4, and 1685. Shakespeare’s earliest dramatic publications, with or without his approval, with or without his active interest, were printed individually in a quarto format (half the size of a folio), a sheet of paper printed on both sides, folded twice to yield four leaves (or eight pages). These quartos were by our standards large books, the quarto leaf (yielding two pages) being about the size of a modern magazine or, perhaps more appropriately, a newsstand comic book. The shortest of Shakespeare’s plays, The Comedy of Errors, occupies a little over 15 double-columned pages in the First Folio. The longest, the second quarto of Hamlet, occupies 64 quarto pages in its short version of 1603, 104 quarto pages in the longer version of 1604, and just over 28 pages in the First Folio. Between these extremes lie the lengths of the rest of his published dramatic output.The origins of many of these quarto editions are often difficult to determine. Textual historians, no less paranoid than the average citizen, are quick to sniff out corruption and foul play. The usual process of publication, a process that admits for many variations, legal and illegal, has someone from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men or the King’s Men approaching a stationer ... log in or subscribe to read full text